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Carla Neggers [US Marshals 04 Dark Sky (v5.0) (epub)
Cecil Castellucci [Tin Star Stone in the Sky (epub)
Dragon Kin 01 Fire in the sky Michelle Hasker
Carman A Sky [Dark Lair Short Vampires, Werewolves
Big Sky Standoff B. J. Daniels
Come Back Sky Gilbert
C L Moore Northwest of Earth (v5.0) (epub
Creatures of the Earth John McGahern
Battle Earth I Nick S. Thomas
Brothers of Earth C. J. Cherryh

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.What I do not say is that my body has arrived but the rest of me is lost, perhaps in transit.In my dreams at night, I have lost my luggage, my wallet, my passport.I cannot find a taxi, I miss the bus, I drive past the airport again and again.I have brought the wrong ticket, I must make a phone call but I cannot find a quarter.My suitcase is full of toilet paper, full of ants, full of Orange Cream Biscuits.In my dreams, I do not know where I am going: am I coming here or going home? It is more than just the altitude.On Saturday morning, I go with Lorna and Sasha to the open-air vegetable market.Under roofed stalls, farmers preside over piles of potatoes, skinny green chilies, dried fish, unidentifiable roots and bulbs.Several varieties of rice, including Bhutan’s own “red” rice, which turns a pinkish-brown when cooked, baskets of rice crisps, buckwheat, barley.Strings of dried cheese cubes, pungent balls of raw cheese, dried mushrooms and apples and fierce red chili powder measured out in blackened tin cups.The odor of the cheese mixes with the caustic smell of betel nut and the lime paste it is chewed with, and sends us scurrying away.In the handicraft section, we find religious books and ritual objects—little brass bowls, chalices, long musical horns, incense.Bamboo baskets and mats, twig brooms, a black yak-hair blanket.I run my hand over it and shudder at the scabrous texture.At one end of the market is the meat department.Men with axes hack apart carcasses, hang up strips of red flesh.Legs and hoofs in one pile, intestines in another.“I grew up on a farm,” Lorna tells us.“This doesn’t bother me.” It bothers me, but I maintain a grim silence.I’m trying to appear as imperturbable as the others.Three pigs, the color of old wax, lie side by side, eyes frozen open.A man brushes past us, hoisting a bloody leg of something over his shoulder.“Yes, madam?” calls a boy with an axe in his hand.“Anything?” We shake our heads and move on.On the way out, we pass religious men with prayer beads, chanting prayers, telling fortunes with handlettered cards and dice.One man has a miniature three-storied temple, called a tashi-go-mang, its myriad tiny doors open to reveal statues and intricate paintings of deities.People touch coins and bills to their foreheads and then press them into the doorways for luck and blessings.“Do you want your fortune told?” Lorna asks.I shake my head vehemently.That’s all I would need—confirmation of my grandfather’s predictions.At the market, we see a few tourists for the first time, distinguishable from the resident expatriates by the cameras around their necks; the expats are carrying jute bags loaded with tomatoes and onions.Tourism is carefully regulated, we learned during orientation, so that Bhutan can preserve its culture.The number of annual visitors is kept low by a daily tariff of two hundred U.S.dollars.After the market, we go to the bank to cash travelers’ checks into ngultrum, the Bhutanese currency.I feel I have walked into a scene from Dickens.In the gloom inside, dozens of clerks behind wire-mesh walls labor over massive, dusty ledgers, writing figures with leaky fountain pens, counting stacks of money, tying up sheaves of yellowed paper, seemingly ignoring the customers who are pressed up against the counter, waving slips of paper.I am required to sign my name an inordinate number of times before I am given a brass token and told to wait “that side.” I head in the direction of “that side” and wait for an hour, folded into the crowd at the counter, standing on tiptoe to see what the clerk in the cage is doing, straining to hear my number, irritated with the whole disorderly, inexplicable process.There’s no sign telling me where I should be, there’s no line, people push and press and squeeze in front of me, and the clerk is ignoring us all as he chats to a blue-uniformed guard with an ancient, rusted rifle.Do these people have all the time in the world or what? This is something I have already thought a good number of times, waiting for breakfast in the hotel, standing at the counter in shops or offices, stuck behind a truck blocking a lane, wondering why the bakery isn’t open yet when the sign says clearly OPEN 8 AM and it’s already 8:20.Everything seems to take up more time, and the more time things take up, the more time people seem to have.“Doesn’t this just make you crazy?” I ask Lorna.She shrugs.“It’s not like we have to be anywhere,” she says.It’s true.We aren’t going anywhere.What is my problem? I have all the time in the world, and I am more impatient than ever.After the orientation session, we begin a week of language lessons.For a small country, Bhutan has an extraordinary number of languages and dialects; at least eighteen have been recognized, some confined to a single village.Lorna, Sasha and I are to learn Sharchhog-pa-kha, which means “eastern-staying people’s tongue,” the main language of eastern Bhutan.Chuni, the pretty, soft-spoken young woman who is to be our teacher, says we can call both the people and the language “Sharchhop” for short.Sharchhop has no script.We cannot hear the difference between b and bh, d and dh.I cannot pronounce tshe or nga.The grammar is incomprehensible, the verb must dangle its legs off the end of the sentence, and our progress is slow [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]